News

Resistance to Hitler

AS A member of the von Rabenau family, I would like to express my appreciation of your article ‘Codebreakers solve Hitler bomb riddle’ (News, last week), on the fate of our then family senior, General Friedrich von Rabenau.

For the last seven weeks of their lives, Von Rabenau shared a prison cell with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the 60th anniversary of whose execution was commemorated on April 9, and whose statue now stands as one of

10 20th-century martyrs above the entrance of Westminster Abbey. Von Rabenau’s involvement in the preparations for the overthrow of Hitler stemmed, like Bonhoeffer’s, from his deep Christian convictions.

He relinquished his position as chief of the German army archives in 1942 and went on to study theology, gaining a doctorate from the University of Berlin, before he was arrested and then killed in the way you described. However, von Rabenau did not, as you implied, work